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Marshmallow Challenge

For the opening day of my STEM course I used this activity, inspired by the following TED talk:

I found it to be a great experience for my students. It was a fun way to start the year and the first step towards encouraging my students to take risks within my classroom. Since this was the first time I met my students, it turned out to be a great way to introduce myself and learn a little about them as they worked through the activity.

There was a lot of success and a lot of failure throughout the activity for my students. In hindsight, I think this activity would have been a perfect activity to document with their smart phones, which is something I will definitely try in the future. The activity also was a good lead in to our first topic, scale and units. For homework I had them research large buildings from around the world and look for similarities in their structures. We opened the next class with a discussion about those similarities and whether or not they noticed them in their own marshmallow tower designs. After this discussion, I had them consider what they might do differently if they were given this task again in the future. I am hoping I can find a random day to do this again and see if we’ve learned from the past or if they’ve improved with working in groups.